107 Responses

They are merrily seeding software out there in copyright theft land (the torrents, even though we’re all now shifting to “magnets” and if you want to know more you’ll have to buy a friendly geek a beer)

Very timely. I've been curious about this - when the law was still being discussed, the admin fee was framed in terms that *explicitly* included preventing fishing expeditions, and examples expressed were rights holders trying it on with entire bands of IP addresses without any evidence. Then the law was introduced, and all that talk went away, and the admin fee turned purely into a practical step to prevent undue administrative costs to ISPs. Fair enough, but then rumours started circulating about rights holders thinking of ways to circumvent the fee.

So, was the original intent of the admin for the good of the consumers as well as ISPs? I'd assume that if it was even in part about protecting consumers, that any discussion about circumventing the fee would be moot.

Also, regarding rights holders doing the processing - Vodafone has a considerable amount of information on me that I'd be super-unhappy about them exposing to some random third party looking for excuses to fine me. I trust no ISP would entertain that notion (at least not overnight)?

Finally, regarding the lack of notices that have been sent: how difficult/costly is it for rights holders to actually track infringement? Regarding the music industry in particular, I've had some interesting conversations with people that've worked for major labels in NZ about cost/benefit comparisons of producing kiwi artists (expensive) vs importing american stuff (cheap). Given that kiwi output (even the really popular stuff) isn't really viewed as particularly profitable, would it be reasonable to assume the price of setting up this kind of system (or paying an outsourcer) would be too high to justify the potential reward? It'd make sense to me that the only infringements are being sent regarding artists that are already inside a monitoring framework. Basically I'm wondering if NZ is too small a copyright infringement market to bother with.

Rianz would not confirm whether it intended to make an example of the TelstraClear customer. Esmee Dunlop, of its public relations company, PPR, said the association would "not normally comment on anything copyright related".

Given Netflix accounts for about 30% of US internet traffic I would say that ISPs would be interested promoting as much legitimate content as possible. It would be nice if the content providers decided to sell content to NZ consumers.

One line of thinking suggests that if the rights holders won't pay $25 then the value of the product is less than $25 - so why is the fine $15,000? I'll pay $25 to watch that season of Breaking Bad/Justified/Doctor Who/Game of Thrones but of course they won't let me.

Just to clarify also, I'm not opposed to the idea of copyright. Far from it - I made my living for many years via copyright and I cherish the notion that I can earn money by simply thinking about stuff and writing it down. My fear is that this kind of activity so devalues copyright in the public view that we raise a generation of kids who see stealing copyright material as normal and "right".

Many reasons. I have a family of four and in the past decade we've moved from using 1GB/month (seriously) to 100GB/month.

My daughters both use the connection for their home work, my wife uses it to catch up on TV, and do wifely stuff and I work from home as I did a decade ago, but now I expect streaming hi def content rather than Lotus Notes inspired text.

Television content makes up a large percentage of my traffic and I'd love to pay someone for it, but for the most part they won't let me.

Incidentally, I pay Quickflix $10/month not because I watch what they've got on offer so far but because I badly want someone to succeed in this market so I treat this as seed funding of the smallest order.

For us, four devices at home with auto-updating software, motion-detecting cameras uploading to a server off-network, heavy youtube usage by 2-3 people, streaming tv programs from tv1/2/3/7, occasional working from home over VPN -- it adds up. Maybe not to 20GB, but certainly 10. I would imagine households of more than 3 people could easily use a 20gGB cap even if everything they did was on the level, if they were mostly interested in video format content.

The US loves (needs?) wars, it looks like the wars on drugs and terror are fizzers, so hey, copyright looks good - they is armed for bear...

For a while it seemed attacking the symptom was a licence to print money and good publicity. But now, it's increasingly proving to be bankrupt in all senses of the word, just as Prohibition was in 1920s America.

So perhaps wee need to apply some Copyright Math to the problem. After all whats $25 against savings of $150,000?

Incidentally, I pay Quickflix $10/month not because I watch what they've got on offer so far but because I badly want someone to succeed in this market so I treat this as seed funding of the smallest order.

After initial reservations about content my family is now enjoying Quickflix. I should point out that we have been waiting for relatively ad free stuff on demand for close to eight years. Amazingly, this service works on one of the crappiest connections in Auckland. As a TV and Sky free home, for us the current cost of DVD's is quite high. Certainly sufficient to support a premium on-demand service; if it is the right one. I'm assuming we can't be the only ones?